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N0KFQ > TODAY 18.07.14 16:00l 53 Lines 2468 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Jul 18
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Jul 18, 1960:
Fifteen-year-old Brenda Lee earns a #1 hit with "I'm Sorry"
She was several inches short of five feet tall, even in socks and
saddle shoes, and she weighed no more than 90 pounds, but her
voice was that of a heavyweight. Just 15 years old but already
five years into a professional recording career, "Little Miss
Dynamite" Brenda Lee earned the first of her many smash pop hits
when "I'm Sorry" reached the top of the Billboard charts on July
18, 1960.
Brenda Lee was born Brenda Mae Tarpley in the charity ward of an
Atlanta hospital in December 1944, the daughter of an itinerant
semipro baseball player/carpenter who was killed in a
construction accident when she was only eight years old. A true
singing prodigy, Brenda was a veteran of numerous regional talent
contests, radio shows and television programs by the time she got
her big break at the age of 11, when she met country star Red
Foley shortly before a concert in Augusta, Georgia, and was
invited onstage by him to perform Hank Williams' "Jambalaya."
Three encores later, little Brenda Lee was on her way to being a
star. "I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I
heard that voice," Foley would later say. "There I stood, after
26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of
an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare
in my eyes....I felt guilty for not going out to the box office
and buying a ticket."
It would be another four years before she had her big commercial
breakthrough with "Sweet Nothin's" (a #4 hit in early 1960) and
"I'm Sorry," but Brenda Lee made a series of records leading up
to those hits that would defy any cynic's expectations of what a
girl of her age was capable of. Though she would be known during
her heyday as a singer who leaned toward country music, early
records like "Dynamite"_the source of her nickname_and "Bigelow
6-200" were hard-driving rockabilly of the sort that would gain
her entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and would make
lifelong fans of a certain Liverpool foursome who would open for
Lee under the name "The Silver Beetles" during her
pre-Beatlemania tour of Great Britain.
Following her breakthrough #1 hit on this day in 1960, Brenda Lee
went on to earn 27 more top-40 hits over the course of the
1960s_more than any other solo female performer in that decade.
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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